Took some test footage in front of a greenscreen + combined it with some cicada slimelapse stuff, trying to sort out color and compositing and all that. Not sure that crawler will end up looking like this, but working pretty nicely for me.

top-line: it’s a multimedia fantasy series with an environmentalist agenda.

when i say multimedia, i mean that CRAWLER is a single narrative written for multiple media. the pilot will have comics, games, and animation. each part of CRAWLER is told in the format that I think will a) be the most fun and fitting way to experience that chunk of story, and b) produce a well-rounded multimedia experience within each episode.

when i say fantasy, i mean that CRAWLER has magic in it. all of the magic is based in manipulating natural processes, and as such, i'm trying to animate those effects with footage of natural processes. for example, i'm taking timelapses of slime mold, oyster mushrooms, and other detritivores embedded into puppets and set pieces to animate decay-based powers.

this character was sculpted out of clay, painted with an oat flour goo, and then cultured with the slime mold physarumpolycephalum. in the next post i'll get more into slime mold.

when i say environmentalist agenda, i mean thatCRAWLER is aboutenvironmental imbalance. about humanity’s impending crisis point in relation to nature. we can see the mistakes we’re making in failing to conserve our ecosystem, but on the whole we can’t quite manage to amend our behavior yet. this bums me out enormously.

there's going to be a lot of magic slime.

in the tradition of stories like princess mononoke, silent spring, fern gully, cosmos, and dune, CRAWLER is a cautionary tale about our world's and our species’ fragility, and a venue to explore how we might avoid self-inflicted extinction.

i turned 29 this month. alone, it's unremarkable, but i’m happy to report that working on CRAWLER feels like an important adjustment to my career’s heading. if i’m going to follow my bliss to make trippy geeky shit, i’d like it to be educational, or at least thought-provoking. i want to emulate miyazaki and sagan and other makers who made work around a conscience, around causes they cared about. CRAWLER feels like a big step in the right direction.

Hi there! I'm excited to get deeply, deeply nerdy in recording my progress on CRAWLER in this space. I have so much slime to share! In the meantime, here's a handy video introducing the project (and my background as an artist) that I put together for a grant application this fall.